Science
...There have been great changes in the life, surroundings and conditions of human beings during the present century. Less than a hundred years ago many of the things that we do now were thought to be impossible. For example, flying and other things, like listening to music from thousands of miles away on the radio would certanly have been thought impossible if people had never imagined them. If your great-grandfather could spend a day or two in our modern world he would be astonished at the sight of people riding along in buses nearly as big as a house, at great men - carrying "birds",filling the sky with the thunder of their jet-engines and at the way a room can be lighted at a moment by the turn of a switch. There is no end of things that would amaze him. But none of these things would amaze him as the small radio and TV-sets. Radio and television are no longer just inventions which bring pleasure and amusement into our homes. By means of radio & television we can do an endless number of jobs: call doctors to the far-off places in the Artic, help airplanes to land automatically in bad weather, direct thework of a dozen machines at once or guid the flight of rockets and sputnics in space. It was radio and television that made it possible to photograph the far side of the Moon, and watch the first space travellers throughout their flight in space. Among the most important scientific discoveries are new medicines. Several illnesses from which many years ago people used to die, can now be cured quite easily. One of the wonders of our age is the "electronic brain", or "a giant calculating machine", which can be, to some extend, duplicate human senses. These machines can feel, touch , smell, hear and see. They can solve mathmatical problems many hundreds of times faster than a human mathimatician and are widely used for calculations of orbits of sputnics and spaceships for example such machines can make translations from one language into another. Perhaps, the most wonderful discovery of the XX century has been the splitting of the atom. The process of splitting of the atom is called nuclear fission when atoms split they set free a tremendous amount of energy. Men are learning to put this energy to use. Our country was the first country in the world to use the atomic energy for peaceful purposes. The first atomic power-plant and the first atomic ice-breaker were built in our country. The advantages of atomic power are great. For one thing, atomic fuel has no smoke for another enough fuel to last for years can be stored in a very small space. The tremendous energy hidden in the atom, however, can bring death to millions of people if it is used in atom bombs. That`s why peace-loving people throughout the world are now fighting for the banning of atomic weapons for good and all. Outstanding Scientists Of The World. The world knows the names of many great scientists: mathematicians, physicists, chemists, biologists, linguists, historians, etc. A lot of discoveries have been made by them in different fields of science and engineering. But the greatest event of the 20^ century was the flight of Man into space. Special merit here belongs to Russian scientists. Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky is one of them. K. Tsiolkovsky was born in 1879 in a small Russian village near Ryasan. Through all his life he had been working on the problem of interplanetary travel. He worked out the theory of cosmic flights. K. Tsiolkovsky believed that mankind will not remain on Earth forever)), and he dreamt to see that day. But he died in 1935. The man who was standing behind Soviet space strategy from the 1930s was Sergei Pavlovich Korolev. An outstanding scientist, he devoted all his life to rocket research, constructing artificial satellites. The first artificial sputnik was launched on October 4, 1957. The Russians have every right to be proud of it. Some years later the most remarkable event in the history of Cosmonautics took place. On April 12, 1961 the spaceship , piloted by Yuri Gagarin, went up. It is due to Korolev's genius and some other top engineers' talent that Russia became the world leader in conquering space. Yuri Gagarin was the first man who made his historic flight into space. The whole world applauded to this handsome young man. He orbited the earth once, staying in space for only 108 minutes, but he was the first to fly to stars. Mankind will always remember him. In commemoration of Gagarin's flight April 12^ has been made the International Day of Cosmonautics. With Gagarin's flight to cosmos Tsiolkovsky's dreams came true. A new age of space exploration began. Isaac Newton, one of the greatest men in the history of science, was born in a little village in England in 1642. When Isaac was nineteen he became a student of Cambridge University. He began to study physics, astronomy and mathematics. Newton's contribution to these sciences is so great that he may be considered the founder of modern mathematics, physics and spectroscopy. Newton discovered the law of motion and the universal law of gravitation. He studied the nature of light and colour and came to the conclusion that white light is composed of many different colours known to us as the spectrum. Such a phenomenon was quite unknown before Newton's work. So long as humanity lives, Isaac Newton, the greatest of men of science, will never be forgotten. Dmitri Mendeleyev. In 1869 the great Russian scientist Dmitri Mendeleyev announced the discovery of the Periodic Law of elements. So science received the key to the secrets of matter. All the greatest discoveries have been made since then in the fields of chemistry and physics have been based on this law. The elements in Mendeleyev's Periodic Table follow one another in the order of their atomic weights. They are arranged in periods and groups. Mendeleyev's discovery made it possible for the scientists to find 38 new chemical elements to fill the empty spaces left in the Periodic Table. At the same time they tried to find elements heavier than the last element in the Periodic Table. In 1955 the American scientist Dr. Glenn Seabord obtained element No 101 and named it Mendelevium in honour of the creator of the Periodic Law.